Despite surprise, interactive content still shines in study

Even though a study on the persuasive power of different types of media by a University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) assistant professor of English had a surprising result in the interactive age, interactive content still proved its power of persuasion.

Dr. Ryan Weber and co-researchers Semih Dinc, a UAH computer science graduate student, and Matthew Williams, a UAH English graduate student, studied how the use of different media to present information on NASA's James Webb Telescope project would affect levels of support for the project and for NASA in general.

They had hypothesized that interactive media would test better in generating overall support. Instead, they found that using either traditional illustrated color text or interactive programming increased test subjects' support for NASA's James Webb Telescope project by about the same amount, a solid 36 percent.

While most of the uncertain participants changed their minds or support the project, those who had initially said they did not support NASA were not persuaded.

"All these texts did an extremely good job of turning people who were uncertain into being supporters of the project. There is just a greater likelihood that uncertain people will change their support to a yes, while there is a very low likelihood that people who initially said no would change their mind to yes or even to uncertain," says Dr. Weber.

"One reason I wanted to look at NASA for this study is that they are very, very good at social media," he says. "One of the takeaways from this research is that all of these materials are doing a very good job of heightening awareness and increasing how receptive people are to the message."

Credit: University of Alabama in Huntsville

Interactive media did have a statistical edge in increasing the level of project support when participants were asked later to rank their level of support numerically from 1 to 7 Dr. Weber says.

"The support rankings showed a statistically significant increase," he says. "The other place interactive texts did better was that people ranked their quality better. NASA's Interactive Fly-by Tour simulator was especially effective in changing their mind."

Yet increased support generated in the study for the Webb telescope project didn't have coattails.

"What we found was that these interventions did not change people's minds about whether the federal government should fund space science and exploration projects. Those answers were largely unchanged pre and post intervention," Dr. Weber says. "The dramatic level of increases in support for this project did not translate into more people supporting federal funding for NASA."

The study focused on three participant groups. The control group received a brief text description of the telescope. A second group viewed an eight-page color Portable Document Format (PDF) file about the project. The third group viewed a four-minute You Tube video with an interactive flyby simulator.

"The You Tube video and flyby simulator give users a level of control and provide information through more sensory channels," say Dr. Weber.

The 660 study participants in the Qualtrics test were asked before and after viewing the materials whether they supported, were uncertain or did not support NASA's James Webb Telescope project. They were asked to rank the level of their support and to assign on a sliding scale a percentage of NASA's budget to the telescope. Participants were asked whether they support federal funding for NASA, and were then provided with a link to more information or to sign a petition. Researchers tracked the number who signed.

Related Stories

Inside a massive clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland the James Webb Space Telescope team used a robotic am to install the last of the telescope's 18 mirrors onto the telescope structure.

A new video from NASA shows the successful installation of the first of 18 flight mirrors onto the James Webb Space Telescope Structure, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The installation of the ...

(Phys.org)—A new photograph taken inside the giant clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., shows what looks like a giant Erector Set supporting a test component of the James Webb Space Telescope.

NASA is contractually extending science operations for its Hubble Space Telescope an additional five years. The agency awarded a sole source contract extension Thursday to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy ...

With surgical precision, two dozen engineers and technicians successfully installed the package of science instruments of the James Webb Space Telescope into the telescope structure. The package is the collection of cameras ...

Recommended for you

Off the coast of Washington, columns of bubbles rise from the seafloor, as if evidence of a sleeping dragon lying below. But these bubbles are methane that is squeezed out of sediment and rises up through the water. The locations ...

New photonic tools for medical imaging can be used to understand the nonlinear behavior of laser light in human blood for theranostic applications. When light enters biological fluids it is quickly scattered, however, some ...

One of the ocean's little known carnivores has been allocated a new place in the evolutionary tree of life after scientists discovered its unmistakable resemblance with other sea-floor dwelling creatures.

In research that casts cells as curators of their own history, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists have discovered that adult tissues retain a memory, inscribed on their DNA, of the embryonic cells from which they arose. ...